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MILAN, Oct 1 (Reuters) – Saipem does not see regulatory risks for its planned merger with Norwegian rival Subsea7, the CEO of the Italian energy contractor said on Wednesday, shrugging off concerns about potential hurdles in the Brazilian market. "We firmly believe that there is no reduction in competition, but rather a better offering, and that the creation of a group (with Subsea7) will greatly benefit our customers around the world," Saipem's Alessandro Puliti said, speaking at the Energy Summit conference in Milan. Exxon Mobil, Brazilian state-run Petrobras and oil services provider TechnipFMC petitioned Brazil's antitrust regulator CADE to intervene in the Saipem-Subsea7 merger, public documents seen by Reuters showed. (Reporting by Francesca Landini, editing by Gavin Jones)

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LONDON, Oct 1 (Reuters) – Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey said on Wednesday that any stablecoin that becomes widely used as a means of payment in Britain needs to be regulated like standard banks, with depositor protections and access to BoE reserve facilities. Bailey – a long-standing sceptic about cryptocurrencies – wrote in an article in the Financial Times that it would be "wrong to be against stablecoins as a matter of principle". But he said their main current use as a way to enter and exit cryptocurrency trades did not amount to a standard money-like means of payment. Bailey confirmed the BoE would publish a consultation paper on stablecoins in the coming months. "In doing so, we will set out that widely used UK stablecoins should have access to accounts at the BoE in order to reinforce their status as money," he said. (Reporting by David Milliken; Editing by Kate Holton)

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Oct 1 (Reuters) – Acuity Inc: * ACUITY REPORTS FISCAL 2025 FOURTH-QUARTER AND FULL-YEAR RESULTS Source text: Further company coverage:

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SEOUL, Oct 1 (Reuters) – Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix have signed letters of intent to supply memory chips for OpenAI's data centers, they said on Wednesday, as South Korean chipmakers join forces with the ChatGPT maker to meet rising demand from its Stargate project. The announcements were made on Wednesday after OpenAI CEO Sam Altman met South Korean President Lee Jae Myung and the chairmen of Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix at the presidential office in central Seoul. (Reporting by Heekyong Yang and Hyunjoo Jin. Editing by Mark Potter and Jan Harvey)

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(Adds detail, context throughout) By Julia Payne BRUSSELS, Oct 1 (Reuters) – The European Commission will propose cutting steel import quotas by nearly half and hiking duties on volumes above those levels to 50% in line with tariffs imposed by the U.S. and Canada, a source briefed on details told Reuters on Wednesday. The measures will be part of a new package for the steel sector set to be officially unveiled on October 7. Stephane Sejourne, the Commission's executive vice president for industrial strategy, briefed steel associations on Wednesday ahead of next week's announcement. The bloc's current steel safeguards will expire on June 30 next year. The EU and Western allies are trying to contain the overcapacities created by subsidized Chinese factories in steel and other sectors. The EU already tightened current steel import quotas by 15% from April 1, and the Commission is investigating market trends for potential aluminium safeguards as well as export duties on scrap metal. Steel jumped into the spotlight early this year after U.S. President Donald Trump hiked tariffs on foreign steel and aluminium imports to 50%. After reaching a general trade agreement with Trump in late July, the EU said it would work closely with Washington in a "metals alliance" to ringfence their respective production from China. European steelmakers still face an export tariff of 50% to the U.S. EU trade commissioner Maros Sefcovic met U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer in Asia earlier this month to reignite the talks. EU sources previously told Reuters the new safeguards would be a jumping-off point for detailed negotiations with Washington. (Reporting by Julia Payne; Writing by Inti Landauro; Editing by Benoit Van Overstraeten, Philip Blenkinsop and Jan Harvey)

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Oct 1 (Reuters) – Nexi SpA: * RESERVE BANK OF NEW ZEALAND SELECTS NEXI TO UPGRADE ITS RTGS SYSTEM Further company coverage: (Gdansk Newsroom)

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(Adds JANAF pipeline statement) BELGRADE, Oct 1 (Reuters) – The U.S. Department of the Treasury has granted a special licence delaying full sanctions on Serbia's Russian-owned oil company NIS and allowing its operations to continue until October 8, NIS said on Wednesday. NIS operates the only oil refinery in the Balkan country. The U.S. Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control initially placed sanctions on Russia's oil sector on January 10, and gave Gazprom Neft 45 days to exit ownership of NIS. Sanctions had been postponed several times since, but last week the U.S. said sanctions would be launched on October 1. NIS – in which Gazprom Neft owns a 44.9% stake, Gazprom 11.3% and the Serbian government 29.9% – operates Serbia's sole refinery, in the town of Pancevo, just outside Belgrade. The Pancevo facility has an annual capacity of 4.8 million tons and covers most of the Balkan country's needs, and sanctions could jeopardise its supply of crude via Croatia's Janaf. JANAF in a statement on Wednesday said it also has a licence to transport crude oil for NIS until October 8. "In the coming days, JANAF d.d., through its American lawyer and with the support of the Government of the Republic of Croatia, will apply to OFAC with the aim of obtaining an extension of the aforementioned license," it said. "The possibility of extending the licence after October 8, 2025 will largely depend on further activities undertaken by the company NIS a.d. according to the competent American institutions." (Reporting by Antonis Pothitos and Ivana Sekularac; Editing by Sharon Singleton and Ed Osmond)

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(For a Reuters live blog on U.S., UK and European stock markets, click or type LIVE/ in a news window) * Healthcare sector eyes best day in over two years * UK's Tate & Lyle slides after cutting profit outlook (Updates prices, adds analyst comments and details) By Amir Orusov and Shashwat Chauhan Oct 1 (Reuters) – European shares advanced on Wednesday, with healthcare stocks leading the way following a U.S.-Pfizer deal that reduced uncertainty in the sector, even as concerns lingered over a potential delay in the release of the U.S. monthly jobs data. The pan-European STOXX 600 gained 0.3% to 560 points by 0903 GMT, set for its fourth consecutive day of gains. Local bourses were mixed. Spain's benchmark was down 0.4%, while the UK's FTSE 100 climbed 0.7% to an all-time high. Healthcare stocks jumped 3.1%, set for its biggest one-day gain since August 2023. On Tuesday, Pfizer agreed to lower prescription drug prices in the U.S. Medicaid programme in exchange for tariff relief. "The sector generally has struggled over the last year or so and what we are hopefully beginning to see is some measure of clarity about what the rules of the game may look like," said Richard Flax, chief investment officer at Moneyfarm. Other pharma stocks also gained. Ambu rose 7.2%, Sartorius 8.4%, Merck 5.7%, Roche 5% and AstraZeneca 6.2%. Separately, Novartis gained 2.5% after the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved its oral treatment for a type of chronic inflammatory skin disease. On the downside, technology dipped 0.6%, while real estate lost 0.8%. Meanwhile, the U.S. government shut down much of its operations on Wednesday, something which could likely halt the release of the September employment report due on Friday. Without the data, it could impair the Federal Reserve's ability to gauge the economy's health before its monetary policy meeting later in the month. That means a U.S. private payrolls report due later in the day could receive more attention. In Europe, data showed euro zone manufacturing activity slipped back into contraction in September. A similar decline was reported from France and Germany. In the UK, manufacturing activity shrank at the fastest pace in five months. UK blue-chips remained higher on the healthcare boost, while the midcap index was last down 0.1%. Separately, euro zone inflation accelerated last month on higher services prices and a smaller decline in energy costs, likely reinforcing bets on the ECB keeping interest rates on hold for some time. Among other stocks, UK's Tate & Lyle dropped 9.4% after the food ingredients maker warned that its annual profit and revenue would fall. Arcadis climbed 8.6% after the Dutch engineering firm launched a new buyback program. (Reporting by Shashwat Chauhan in Bengaluru and Amir Orusov in Gdansk; Editing by Harikrishnan Nair)

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By Sneha S K Oct 1 (Reuters) – Bristol Myers Squibb, Takeda Pharmaceuticals and Astex Pharmaceuticals are coming together to share proprietary data for training an artificial intelligence model to assist drug discovery and development. The companies are joining a consortium that includes AbbVie and Johnson & Johnson, and will contribute data from several thousand experimentally determined protein–small molecule structures to train an AI model called OpenFold3, life sciences company Apheris said on Wednesday. The initiative is based on a federated data sharing model, which enables collaboration without exposing sensitive data. Germany-based Apheris' computing platform enables the aggregation of diverse data sets from companies while ensuring each dataset remains securely in its original location. By pooling these datasets, the initiative aims to improve OpenFold3’s accuracy in predicting interactions of proteins and small molecules. The federated platform allows multiple companies to "advance predictive models for small molecule discovery in ways no single organization could achieve alone," said Payal Sheth, vice president, discovery biotherapeutics and lead discovery and optimization at Bristol. OpenFold3 is the flagship project of the industry-led AI Structural Biology Network, conducted in collaboration with the AlQuraishi Lab at Columbia University. This consortium really ties into our larger corporate goal of embedding AI throughout all of what we do; and also a nice example of how we can come together as pharma companies and do even more for patients than we could if we did it on our own, said Hans Bitter, head of computational sciences at Takeda. (Reporting by Sneha S K in Bengaluru; Editing by Sahal Muhammed)

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(Adds details from ministry statement, background) WARSAW, Oct 1 (Reuters) – Poland will extend controls on its borders with Germany and Lithuania introduced this summer until April 4, 2026, the interior ministry said on Wednesday. Poland introduced temporary controls along borders with Germany and Lithuania in July, echoing moves by several other European Union countries in reimposing frontier checks to stem illegal migration. Poland has been facing what it says is a migrant crisis orchestrated by Belarus and Russia on its eastern border since 2021. Both countries deny encouraging migrants to cross. The border controls were initially for a month, and were extended for another two months in August. The interior ministry confirmed to Reuters that the new extension would come into force on October 5 and run until April 4, 2026. "We are extending border controls with Germany and Lithuania to monitor the migration route leading from the Baltic states, through Poland, to Western Europe," Interior Minister Marcin Kierwinski was quoted as saying in a subsequent statement. "We are catching individuals who illegally attempt to smuggle migrants to the West." The ministry said that in the first eight months of 2025, nearly 25,000 attempted illegal crossings were recorded at the Polish-Belarusian border. Border guards detained nearly 500 third-country nationals who illegally crossed the border from Lithuania into Poland, it said. More than 2,100 people were detained for attempting to cross the border from Poland into Germany, including nearly 550 foreigners who had previously illegally crossed the Polish-Belarusian border. (Reporting by Karol Badohal; writing by Anna Wlodarczak-Semczuk; Editing by Aidan Lewis)

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